New blog site for the church band: between the banks...

For four and a half years we've had a church band ~ Between the Banks ~ that has been creating beautiful, challenging and compassionate music... without our own site.  We've played with a LOT of local folk ~ and supported their music ~ but we've never really promoted out own.  Sure, I post updates about Thanksgiving Eve and Fat Tuesday (and soon we'll have some smokin' video clips) and a few friends have helped us over the years get some clips up on You Tube.  But we've never had our own blog site to share updates and interpretation.

Until now... Di has been the creative energy behind this project and you can check it out here: http://betweenthebanks.wordpress.com/ To be sure, it is a work in progress, but now we can start to keep folks up to date about the creative and very unique "church" music we are creating, playing, writing and sharing.  This is waay cool...

Here is the graphic Di created to promote the band and our artistic/liturgical projects.  The name comes from a variety of sources:  we are literally situated - as a church - between two banks, we are aware of the banks of the beautiful and wounded Housatonic River that flows through the center of our community, and we think back to our early relatives in faith who often found themselves between the banks of the Red Sea or the Jordan River - and thought the name worked.  We are never ONE type of band.  We are genre benders... and feel a calling to be between what is real and what we can imagine.

I once wrote that the music that speaks to my soul ~ and to a wide variety of people in and outside the church ~ is "soul" music:  music that is sacred, prophetic, fun, moving, beautiful, challenging and honest.  No bullshit allowed.  It moves beyond sacred/secular barriers and seeks to integrate the ordinary with the extraordinary.  It is an aesthetic experiment with what St. Paul wrote in Romans 12:

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
I look forward to writing and sharing thoughts on the this new site and trust it will bring the message to more folks, too.